Poigai Alvar

Poigai Alvar is reckoned the first of the twelve Alvars, the Tamil poet-saints whose Vishnu-intoxicated verse forms the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, the 'Four Thousand' hymns that Shrivaishnavism reveres as a Tamil Veda. With Bhutham and Pey he makes up the mudhal alvars, the earliest three, whom scholars place broadly in the middle centuries of the first millennium, though tradition assigns them a far greater antiquity. Hagiography gives him a birth without parents: he was found, it is told, in a lotus in the temple tank at Tiruvekka in Kanchipuram — poigai means 'pond', and the saint is named for it. Tradition further holds him to be an embodiment of Panchajanya, Vishnu's conch.

The night at Tirukkovilur

The founding legend of Tamil Vaishnavism belongs to these three saints together. On a night of storm at Tirukkovilur, Poigai took shelter in a narrow temple corridor with room for one to lie down. Bhutham arrived: two could sit. Pey arrived: three could stand. Pressed in the dark, they felt a fourth crowding among them — and knew it for Vishnu, come to be squeezed among his devotees. Each saint poured out a hundred-verse antadi on the spot, and Tamil Vaishnava poetry begins with that downpour.

The lamp of the world

Poigai's contribution, the Mudhal Tiruvandadhi, opens with the image by which he is remembered: to see the Lord in the darkness he lights a lamp — the earth for the bowl, the surrounding sea for the ghee, the blazing sun for the flame. The cosmos itself becomes the votive offering. His hundred linked venba verses set the pattern of the antadi form, each verse beginning with the word that ended the last, and set the tone — wonder governed by craft — for everything the later Alvars wrote.